A consumer champion has launched a £750 million legal claim against Apple, linked to an incident in 2017 around a power management tool on older iPhone models.
Justin Gutmann has accused the tech giant of slowing down the performance of iPhone handsets – a process known as 'throttling' – by hiding a power management tool in software updates to combat performance issues and stop older devices from shutting down suddenly. He has filed a claim with the Competition Appeal Tribunal seeking damages of approximately £768 million for up to 25 million UK owners of a range of older iPhone models.
It alleges that Apple misled users over the incident by pushing them to download software updates it said would improve the performance of some devices but, in fact, slowed them down. The claim relates to the introduction of a power management tool released in a software update to iPhone users in January 2017, which was rolled out to slow down older iPhone models with ageing batteries, which may have struggled to run the latest iOS software, in order to prevent abrupt device shutdowns.
